Better Food Shed / Growing Communities

Where are you?
Barking, London

Online at www.growingcommunities.org/

blog/2019/02/new-kind-wholesaler

Size and type of farm
Sourcing from 15 farms.

Established
2018

Legal structure
Company Limited by Guarantee - with cooperative principles

Number of staff
6 part-time members of staff (3FTE)

Annual turnover and average surplus (profit)
Annual turnover: £965,000

Average annual surplus: £30,000

Direct Sales Model
Distribution Hub

We work with several small/medium scale agroecological growers and producers, as well as a few larger farms. The growers we work with are mainly located in East Anglia and the South East of England. We also have direct relationships with a number of farms across the UK and an organic wholesaler who supplies imported produce when needed. Our main customer base consists of community led box schemes located around London. We also serve a few ‘part-time’ smaller customers e.g cooperative shops, food centred community projects and local authorities.

Every week our farmers send us a price list of what they have to offer which we amalgamate and send out to our customers. We manage the sales, orders and logistics which, combined with deliveries, frees up valuable time for farmers. It also gives farmers the opportunity to alert us about any produce they need to sell. This system allows us to send one combined order on a Thursday, as opposed to eight individual orders, giving them good time to organise and harvest. We put a 15-20% mark-up on the price from farmers, which covers our overheads (wages, rent etc).

Why have you chosen this model and what are the main benefits?
The Better Food Shed (BFS) was set up to answer the direct needs from both farmers and box schemes in the London area. Due to the growth of the box schemes BFS now serves, farmers were unable to keep up with demand and a wholesaler was being used more frequently. Collectively the box schemes wanted to form direct relationships with and buy direct from additional farms. The BFS uses the combined buying power of all the box schemes, enabling smaller box schemes to access a wider range of produce direct from smaller scale and often more local farms. In a way, we are adding an extra link in the supply chain as we are an intermediary between box schemes and farmers. However we think there are many benefits to having this specific model introduced into the supply chain as it greatly supports farmers to access more direct sales, and we operate using a set of core principles to champion agroecological farming and cooperative trading systems.

Smaller farmers really benefit from this scheme as it allows them to concentrate on growing higher value produce and/or produce that grows best on their farm, and giving them a guaranteed market for their produce. There is some cooperation amongst farmers to develop coordinated growing plans and pricing. There are also benefits for the box schemes which we supply, especially in relation to increasing the range of produce available, and linking up to a wider organic market.

Our operation aims to reduce the carbon footprint throughout the supply chain, specifically delivering into London. Prior to the BFS, farmers were driving into London in less efficient vans and often not at full capacity. To improve this, we have mapped out efficient delivery routes, streamlining deliveries to fit several orders on to a delivery run, saving time and carbon emissions.We hope to have our first electric van on the road at the beginning of 2021. We also effectively reduce food waste - our ordering system allows farmers to pick to order, thus avoiding as much wastage as possible. Our system is also not speculative - so we know that all produce picked will be sold, and can keep the mark-up on our buying system low.

What are your essential tools/equipment/pieces of software?
• Bespoke Excel spreadsheet to create and manage our pricelist, orders and van runs.

• Accountancy software, we use Xero.

• A low-cost warehouse, Forklift & Cold store

What are the key factors that helped with development
Better Food Shed was initiated by Growing Communities, which invested financially in running a feasibility study and investing in initial start-up costs. We were in a slightly unusual situation where we had guaranteed financial, IT and business support from our infancy. This has really helped us to get up and running quickly. Some start-up funding would be essential to setting up this kind of system. The ability to move produce quickly and operate in a short space of time has helped to keep operating costs low and allow for a lower markup on produce. To work effectively, it’s important that our staff have some growing experience or an understanding of how growers and farms operate. It wouldn’t work if we didn’t properly understand the constraints and work of farmers.

Forming and investing in good relationships with customers and farmers is vital and is helped by things like paying bills promptly, maintaining flexibility in ordering, and problem solving.

What has been the impact of Covid-19 on your business and how did you adapt?
Covid has had a big impact on the BFS in a number of different ways. We experienced a huge increase in demand through our box schemes – the value of sales over the end of March and April being roughly 35 to 40% higher than budgeted.

This coincided with a number of shortages in the supply chain – the hungry gap kicking in early with lots of our farmers as a result of poor harvest inprevious autumn (due to extremely wet weather in parts of the country) combined with a huge increase in demand across the entire sector meant we had to offer an extremely reduced list of crops to ensure the system could cope.

As we are a relatively small operation, with a strong focus on local food supply systems, we are able to be adaptive. Our farmers and growers point to the flexibility in the BFS’s ordering system as being key to their success and viability during this period.